What he did seems rather grey to me. I don't exactly buy the argument that this was legit access. Especially when he went and downloaded 140,000 some email addresses.

41 months does seem like a ridiculous sentence for stealing some freaking email addresses though. Is it really supposed to be worse just because he got Michel Bloomberg's email address? Isn't punishment supposed to be based on harm done? For a crime, this sounds pretty penny-anty.

Also, web guys...if you're really concerned about speed, maybe you should consider writing some of this code in a lower level language.

Game guy. Please stick to giving advice about game engines. You don't know anything about the web if your suggestion to improve performance is to "write in a lower level language". Your advice is akin to me saying "Hey game guy, if you want faster games, why don't you get a faster internet connection!"

Everything else I agree with.

Perhaps you simply haven't done any real Java coding on an Enterprise level? If you had, you'd never had made such a post.

Why is it everyone thinks THEIR situation obviously reflects EVERYONES. "I've programmed on the "enterprise level" (nonsense terminology), so that means that my experience is just like everyone else's.

Sorry, but bullshit. YMMV. While you're right, that sometimes you do run into crap that isn't compatible, by and large I've had few problems going from Java 3 to 4 to 5 to 6 to 7. I've had quite a few issues upgrading Application servers, but that's a different matter.

Yup. I tried a different plugin that accomplishes the same thing. I had to uninstall it almost immediately because it worked so poorly and gave false positives constantly. I honestly don't even understand why anyone maintains any of those plugins, since they're useless.

It is a difficult role the school has to take on the role of parent or guardian which does mean filtering the content the kids are exposed to.

That's fine, as long as I as a parent would get some say over what gets filters. Personally I feel that Rush Limbaugh is a horrible influence on little minds. He's a horrible person and I'd prefer nobody ever see his ugly face, or listen to his poisonous words.

Can I have him filtered out? Maybe even any website (including this one now) that has the words "Rush Limbaugh" in them.

Yep.

Spend your childhood being a child ... that's what it's for.

Ha! This is the classic example of adults either not remembering or projecting their own ideas about what childhood is/was like. I remember being a kid and having sexual thoughts in maybe 3rd or 4th grade. I've asked other people if they had similar thoughts, and they did. By the time you get to HS, EVERYONE has sexual thoughts and urges. Wanting to look at porn and people fucking is PART of being a child. Your ideas of childhood innocense are a drastic distortion of childhood, likely influenced by what society wants us to believe about childhood.

But hey, at least the conservative impulse has settled down to "Wait till you're an adult to look at pussy" rather than "OMG!! NEVER EVER Look at pussy!"

I don't like censorship more than anyone else, but this is the real world and sometimes ideology has to take a back seat to practicality and an angry mob of parents.

More like, ideology sometimes has to take a back seat to someone elses ideology, because there's more people who espouse it.

Here you go. I've posted the public CA key as well as the private key so attackers can decrypt your traffic with sslsniff. Slashdot won't let me post long strings of characters, so I put it on pastebin. Please install it at your convienence on all your different devices, since it's no big deal to install a poorly protected root CA on your computer.

http://pastebin.com/dEUeaJSA

Just for fun (and because openssl wouldn't let me NOT do it), I put a really secure password on the private key. It'd take decades to crack this password. I mean, nobody could ever guess the passsword. It's a really secure password, just like I'm sure the schools private key and password is.

Oh, and remember kids. SSLSniff by Moxie Marlinspike.

If you think "Root CA BAAAAD!" then you're not looking deeply enough into ssl or the security concepts behind the certificates to understand their ramifications. Stay in school and dig deeper.

Ok, then you certainly wouldn't mind if you installed a root CA that I just hand out to you,right? No security implications of a root CA since it's only a problem if the school uses a proxy server. I'm sure I could find a root CA for you to install if you really believe this.

But then, what you're saying isn't true. Having a copy of sslsniff http://www.thoughtcrime.org/so... would allow the school to intercept all the traffic WITHOUT using a proxy server. In fact anyone with access to the private root CA could do this as well. How secure do you really think the school keeps this private key? If they're like anyone else.... not terribly secure.

(If you'd still like me to russle up a root CA for you to install on all your machines, let me know and I'll prepare one for you. I'll be sure to distribute the private key widely.)

We live in a 24/7 world that ignore the natural cycle and since it saves nothing,why do we need it?

Because despite your fantasies of being disconnected from the natural world, you're part of it. Our bodies are attuned to the day/night cycle. We SHOULD be getting up earlier in the morning, it's just that clocks and regimented schedules have distorted our connection to the natural world. DST and Summer time adjust our regimented world back to the natural world.

Also, believe it or not some people actually LIKE to go outside and experience the world. (And if you think you can just do this yourself by getting up earlier and leaving earlier.... well, you're either extremely lucky to have such a job, or extremely naive that you'll be able to adjust your schedule to your whims).

/It's true, but realistically that's actually more of a problem than people realize.

I travel a lot, and I don't always have data connectivity (it's VERY VERY expensive in certain parts of the world if you don't have a local SIM). I've tried very hard to find a good navigation program with local maps. NavFree USA and NavFreeWorld are pretty good, but there's many parts of the world they don't have maps for.

I really kind of bemoan the fact that phone apps are so data centric. Eventually I'm going to be back within data range, but if I had my wish I'd ask for apps that are designed to be disconnected from the network for a period of time. Why can't my nav app just download all the data for a region if I plan to be offline for a while? (This kind of works for some nav apps... but mostly not). If I'm reading an article on my phone (on a plane for instance), why is it so hard to work in offline mode? If I'm creating a post to put on some social networking site, why is it so hard to save it locally, and post it whenever I have data again?

This is obviously getting off-topic, but I really think the data-centric nature of apps is too reliant on 100% data connections.

The jobs are shifting to introspective languages because the way people work with computers is shifting from the desktop to the web. It only tangentially has anything to do with the speed of computers. There's just not as much call for desktop programs anymore because the shift has moved to a networked world that isn't tied to a desktop machine running (OS-whatever). My guess is that you'll still have a job in desktop apps programming in C++ for 20 years at least, but the world will change under your feet, and already is.

So focus less on the language, and more on the general movement in the world. If you feel like your career prospects are waning, find an employer that works on the web rather than the desktop. Or deals with data processing rather than desktop applications.

The same thing happened in the mainframe era because of the invention of the microprocessor. Whether you "double down" on your C++ knowledge is a matter of risk mitigation and work environment. I'm sure there's some indispensable COBOL programmers out there... but you'd also have to accept some rather limited work environments as well surrounding yourself with other people who've chosen the same path. That's fine, but you have to accept that your're really limiting yourself to a small insular world. If that suits you, great. If not, move on.

It's not of course, but a man can dream can't he? .net isn't dying by any stretch of the imagination. But let's start with languages most people would agree ARE legacy languages:

COBOL (if you can't agree on this, end of conversation)
VB6
various assembly languages (maaaaybe the 68000 family?)
FORTRAN (starting to get controversial here since I know it's still used by some crazy science people who don't want to learn anything modern)
Smalltalk
ALGOL
Forth

I was about to add Pascal... but then noticed some crazy person is still developing Pascal in the form of freaking Delphi, and even has a port for Android phone. WTF?

So that makes me think... if I can't include Pascal, or possibly even FORTRAN, languages I've never known someone to write code for in the past 15 years, but yet there's still new releases of it in legacy languages... then what can I include? I'm sure some nutter will try to argue with me that Forth is still a viable language. COBOL.... just go away.

The better question is more likely, which languages should you really not put your career prospects on? Personally I'd list any of the above languages, but sadly not yet PHP.

Because it's convenient to allow creative interpretation instead of actually amending the Constitution, we've lost much of the point of it all!

Pssstt.. I've got a secret for you. The founding fathers didn't know how to interpret the damn thing either. They couldn't agree, so they just made the bill of rights rather vague and put in place the power of the courts to interpret the law. So "creative interpretting" as you put it was always the intent.

If your idea is to amend the constitution to be clear about everything, you're going to have to do a LOT of amending. How many Supreme court decisions are there every year? That's gives you a very small idea of the role of the supreme court. You really want to amend the constitution that much? Think it's hard to interpret now.. think about if we amended it ever month.

Remeber, the constitution was intentionally made to be rather difficult to amend. I sure as hell don't want to make it easier.

Yup. Dr. Bronners is really a great soap product, and it's sold by a company that's not a bunch of greedy bastards. There's even a documentary on the soap and the company called Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox. The founder is a little nutty, but his message is largely just one of unity among people.

I'm not religious, and I don't believe in anything most people would say is a god, but I like the company and the soap.